Bucknell University Press

To wrap up National Poetry Month, we spoke with Bucknell author Shanee Stepakoff about poetry, publishing, and her forthcoming collection, Testimony: Found Poems from the Special Court for Sierra Leone. A remarkable collection of found poetry, Testimony is derived from public testimonies at a UN-backed war crimes tribunal in Freetown and aims to breathe new life into the records of Sierra Leone’s civil war, delicately extracting heartbreaking human stories from the morass of legal jargon. By rendering selected trial transcripts in poetic form, Stepakoff finds a novel way to communicate not only the suffering of Sierra Leone’s people, but also their courage, dignity, and resilience.

As a psychologist and human rights activist, why did you turn to poetry to tell the stories of Sierra Leone? What does the found poetry form offer this difficult work of sharing the testimonies of trauma survivors?

I had lived and worked in the region for several years and was aware that many truths about the civil war of 1991-2002 were not reaching an international audience because most readers from outside of the West African sub-region were not inclined to spend hours poring through lengthy books in subjects such as global history or political science. 

I felt that a collection of poems would be a way to reach people who might otherwise not take an interest in the human impact of a war in a faraway country. In addition, the courtroom procedures and legal jargon that characterized the war crimes trials made it hard to hear the voices of the survivors who had come to testify. Distilling the lengthy trial transcripts into poetic form made it possible to listen to the narratives with greater attentiveness. I was also drawn to poetry as way to sort through my own vicarious traumatization. Of course, my effort to wrestle with the accounts of wartime atrocities was not nearly as arduous as those who were directly targeted, but nevertheless the process of composing poems provided me with a means of structuralizing reports that might otherwise have been overwhelming.  

In the introduction to Testimony, you write that “The survivor must not merely speak but rather must address other people—specifically, those who are not only willing but determined to hear and to know. This is the broader, deeper meaning of testimony. To bear witness does not necessarily imply participating in a legal or juridical proceeding. To bear witness implies the existence of a speaker, a committed listener, and a language.” How might poetry help us become better, more committed listeners?

A poem is a form of expression that arises when a deep chord is struck within the literary artist and ordinary language no longer suffices. A new way of speaking was required, one with greater-than-usual potency. Readers sense that the poem arose from this deep place, and this piques their attention. A poem communicates about a human experience in a highly concentrated manner, thereby fostering recognition of previously-undiscerned realities. Poems tend to move people at the emotional level, not just the cognitive level. Usually a poem is more memorable than other literary genres, because a strong poem has precise phrases and images that leave an imprint in the mind of the reader. Poems can bypass the defenses that many people mobilize when confronted with evidence of human rights abuses because most poems have auditory and rhythmical properties that are paradoxically soothing even when the subject matter is painful. Literary devices such as assonance, alliteration, near-rhyme, and the right combinations of variation and repetition intensify our willingness to bear witness to harsh truths in a sustained manner without flinching. 

Could you speak to the process of editing and publishing a first poetry collection?

I used a nontraditional approach, transforming prose transcripts into poetic structure, and the material was troubling in that it focused on a devastating war. Therefore, I was uncertain about whether any publisher would be open-minded enough to agree to even read the work, let alone commit to bringing it forth. I was extraordinarily lucky to have reached out to Carmen Gillespie, founding editor of the Griot Book Project Series, to ask if she would consider this collection. In 2019 she read some of the poems, then the manuscript, and committed to sending it out for review. She unexpectedly passed away amidst that process, and it seemed like the project might stall, but then Suzanne Guiod, editor-in-chief of Bucknell University Press, generously stepped in to carry it forward. I was given amazing support from a team of professionals, comprising Suzanne as well as two anonymous reviewers, Bucknell’s managing editor, the cover artist, the foreword writer, and later the copyeditor and production editors, with each person contributing their particular expertise. I am humbled and honored by their dedication and conscientiousness.

Who are other poets and writers you look to for inspiration or enjoyment? Who are you reading the most at the moment?

The “Further Resources” section in my book contains a list of writers from Sierra Leone and one from Liberia whose work highlights the wellsprings of creativity and resilience present in the region. For more than thirty years I have used poems in anti-racism training because they have a greater impact than any other genre. I’ve used Claudia Rankine’s 2014 collection, Citizen, which focuses on the insidious ways that anti-Black racism operates in day-to-day life in the US. I’ve also used a poem from Natasha Trethewey’s 2018 collection Monument, which portrays a childhood experience of racist terror. Yusuf Komunyakaa’s poems on the Vietnam War shed light on the legacy of war. Carolyn Forché’s 1981 collection The Country Between Us, about political repression and war in El Salvador, had a strong impact on me in my youth. More recently I read her 2019 memoir, What You Have Heard Is True, which explores the impact that her exposure to human rights abuses in El Salvador had on her writing. I am inspired by Brenda Hillman’s recent poems incorporating elements of found texts to give expression to grief and anger about militarism and hinting at possibilities for resistance. Aminatta Forna’s 2002 memoir, The Devil That Danced on the Water, tracing her search for the truth about the politically motivated execution of her dissident father by a corrupt dictatorial regime in Sierra Leone, and her four novels and forthcoming essay collection, inspire me not only because of her literary gifts but also because of her psychological and moral courage and her recognition that sometimes remembrance is the only redemption.

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Shanee Stepakoff is a psychologist and human rights advocate whose research on the traumatic aftermath of war has appeared in such journals as Peace and Conflict and The International Journal of Transitional Justice. She holds an MFA from The New School and is completing a PhD in English at the University of Rhode Island.

A Discussion with the Series Editors

A landmark series in the long eighteenth-century and Romantic era, Transits: Literature, Thought & Culture, 1650-1850 publishes books that are timely, transformative, and global in their engagement with arts, literature, culture, and history. Here, we talk with series co-editors Miriam Wallace and Mona Narain about their vision for the series, their new board of advisors, and the continuing relevance of long eighteenth-century studies in changing times.

Q: Eighteenth-century studies has been long associated with a few, dominant figures and with traditional modes of reading texts. The Transits series invites projects that make “provocative connections between postcolonial and decolonial studies, that develop new modes of critical imagining such as those offered by critical race scholarship and the intersections among gender, sexuality, and disability studies.” How does your vision for the Transits series expand traditional thinking in the field?

[Mona]: Traditional eighteenth-century studies has had an interdisciplinary focus largely on Europe and the Anglo-Americas. The Transits series expands this focus further geographically and culturally, considering connections and entanglements across the globe. Transits also encourages new methodologies, emergent in western academia as well as other scholarly locations, that can energize the study of both canonical and different texts.

[Miriam]: I might focus here on “reading” and “texts”—reading stands in for numerous ways to think about the interpretive work that humanists do. We attend carefully to details, whether of language and metaphor or of materials like fabric or painting. And “texts” is such a wonderfully flexible term—taking up the written words of a book, but also the paratextual elements such as puffs, subscription lists, reviews, and visual materials from high art to portraiture to illustration. So while “literature” in the broad sense is central, I’m also excited by work that presses on that concept, belles lettres and beyond—including “texts” that may not be primarily written (bodies, images, textiles, botanical). I’m hoping to be surprised and intrigued.

Q: How will the new Transits advisory board help reflect and extend your vision for the series?

Our board of advisors is composed of scholars who bring considerable expertise and who do precisely the kind of innovative work that we hope to attract to the series. We see these scholars both as models for aspiring authors and as our collaborators in keeping the series fresh and responsive. They represent a range of geographies, histories, critical methods, and cultural concerns that are central to the series, and many are BUP authors themselves. (See, for example, Manu Chander’s Brown Romantics and Jason Farr’s Novel Bodies.) Practically speaking, the board helps us to match readers to manuscripts, to reach scholars doing similarly innovative work, and to publicize new books in the series. Last but not least, the board helps us to keep our fingers on the pulse of new lines of thought developing in the field.

Q: As series editors, what do you look for in book proposals?

A book proposal is itself a genre of persuasive and imaginative writing—one that needs to bring the reader along and invite us in. A good proposal entices the reader, persuasively outlining an original approach and a coherent plan for a book—that is, a project that needs to be a book to have its full impact. We look for proposals that are readable, clear, show familiarity with current scholarship, but most of all that intrigue us—these are proposals and books we want to read!

Proposals should situate the project’s argument within current scholarship and effectively articulate how the project will extend or contribute to current scholarship. Chapter descriptions should be well-fleshed out so that we can see the book’s shape in embryo.

Tell us about the origins of the project. Did it begin life as a dissertation? If so, how has it been reconceived, and for what audience? Or are its roots in archival work that has expanded beyond the original intention? Or perhaps this project is a collection that developed out of a conference panel or two and is now ready to expand into a full-length work?

The proposal should include a realistic timeline for completion—we’d prefer to have a strong project that takes more time than one that is rushed forward. Some idea of the length or approximate word count is also very helpful. And our proposal form asks authors to indicate a sense of audience and some key works that they envision theirs sitting alongside—what does your bookshelf look like and where does your imagined book sit?

We are all the inheritors of the long eighteenth century.

Miriam Wallace and Mona Narain

Q: Why is it important to continue bringing fresh perspectives into eighteenth-century studies? In what ways is the eighteenth-century still relevant to today?

The long eighteenth century from 1650 to 1850 is complex and contradictory, encompassing both the concepts of Enlightenment and Romanticism, but also a period of rapid modernization and reverence for classicism. It was a period of exploration and colonization, of developing human rights and institutionalized abrogation of rights. Areas of intellectual study that found disciplines from literature to natural sciences were formalized, and world geographies were mapped in ways that still resonate today. It was also a period that saw the emergence of new voices and interlocutors—and struggles over global modes of communication including print publication.

While many aspects of the eighteenth century have been productively studied by scholars in the last half century, more sustained work is needed on global connections, multilinguistic archival work, and new interdisciplinary methods. The establishment and flourishing of empires and slavery, the increased circulation of global capital, and the geographical conditions that define our global climate have their roots in this period. We are all the inheritors of the long eighteenth century.

Q: What forthcoming books in the series are you most excited about?

[Mona] Knowing her previous publications, I am excited about Linda Van Blimke’s forthcoming book, Political Affairs of the Heart: Female Travel Writers, the Sentimental Travelogue, and Revolution, 1775-1800. This monograph joins a long list of BUP books on women travelers—including Transatlantic Women Travelers, edited by Misty Krueger, which is just out.

[Miriam] I’m particularly excited about Lindsey Eckert’s forthcoming The Limits of Familiarity: Authorship and Romantic Readers. Eckert’s book explores the cultural value of “familiarity”— an often-dismissed feeling of emotional closeness and comfortable predictability that she sees as foundational to Romanticism as what I might call a “structure of feeling.” Eckert’s book is compelling reading and intersects with recent interest in affect, celebrity, and reception studies.

Other projects currently under consideration touch on transatlantic ecologies and social justice; on animals and the Romantic era; on women and music in Georgian Britain; on landscape and gender; on drama and theatricality in multiple frames from theatrical couples to radical reform; social injustice and French thought; and on the consumption of goods and foodstuffs as ways to navigate Orientalisms. We are delighted by the breadth and richness of the work that is coming our way, promising to keep the series active and impactful.

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Transits Advisory Board Members

Manu Samriti Chander is associate professor of English at Rutgers University-Newark, where he specializes in nineteenth-century studies and colonial/postcolonial literatures. He is the author of Brown Romantics (Bucknell, 2017), the editor of The Collected Works of Egbert Martin (Oxford, forthcoming), and a founding member of the Bigger 6 Collective.

Jason Farr, Marquette University, specializes in British literature and culture of the long eighteenth century with an emphasis on disability and queer studies, health humanities, and sound studies.

Patricia A. Matthew, associate professor of English at Montclair State University, is a specialist in the history of the novel, Romantic-era fiction, and British abolitionist literature and culture. A founding member of the Bigger6 Collective, she is interested in methodologically inventive projects that reimagine historical and geographical boundaries.

Louis Kirk McAuley, associate professor of English at Washington State University, has written on transatlantic eighteenth-century print culture, shifting recently to focus on the intersections among literature, ecology, colonialism and empire. He remains keenly interested in Scottish studies, Gothic fiction (or the politics of horror), and scholarly work that attends to geographies, histories, cultures, and species.  

Kate Parker (former co-editor of Transits) is associate professor in the department of English at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse. Her work centers on social justice pedagogy and the histories of gender, sexuality and feminist activism in—and since—the eighteenth century.

Norbert Schürer teaches in the English department at California State University, Long Beach. His research focuses on Anglo-Indian literature, book history, and women’s writing in the long eighteenth century.

For information about submitting a book proposal to the Transits series, contact Suzanne Guiod at seg016@bucknell.edu.

Happy Women’s History Month! To celebrate, Bucknell University Press would like to share a few words from Misty Krueger, editor of Transatlantic Women Travelers, 1688-1843, followed by some of our own reading recommendations for learning about women’s lives throughout history. 

Transatlantic Women Travelers is an important new collection that brings fresh perspectives on representations of late seventeenth- through mid-nineteenth-century transatlantic women travelers across a range of historical and literary works. While at one time transatlantic studies concentrated predominantly on men’s travels, this volume highlights the resilience of women who ventured voluntarily and by force across the Atlantic—some seeking mobility, adventure, knowledge, wealth, and freedom, and others surviving subjugation, capture, and enslavement. 

Here’s more from our conversation with Misty Krueger: 

BUP: Where did the inspiration for Transatlantic Women Travelers, 1688-1843 come from? Why is the woman’s experience of transatlantic travels in particular an important area of study?

Krueger: Transatlantic Women Travelers, 1688-1843 was initially inspired by a course I designed in 2015 for the University of Maine at Farmington called “Transatlantic 18th-Century Women.” I focused on the lives and writings of and about (mostly) British and American women who traveled transatlantically during the “long” eighteenth century. After teaching the course two times and helping students find research for their essays, I realized that there was plenty of scholarship on transatlantic travel from this time period, but that almost all of it focused on male travelers. When female travelers were mentioned, they often appeared as characters written by male writers. The focus seemed to be placed on men, and women appeared to be on the fringes, or in the male gaze, even though my teaching was showing me that there were plenty of women writers who traveled transatlantically and wrote about either their own travels or fictionalized women’s transatlantic travels. On top of that, these women were amazing! The hardships most endured and the advantages some gained were impressive, to say the least, so why wasn’t there a monograph or collection of essays dedicated to transatlantic women’s travel, I asked. One day in class I said—half joking, half serious—maybe I should edit a collection on this topic.

I proposed a call for papers for a special Aphra Behn Society panel at the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies conference to see what kind of interest the call might generate, and I received more submissions than I could accommodate for the session. Not long afterwards I wrote a call for papers and contacted Bucknell University Press. I knew that this collection would be perfect for Bucknell because of its Transits series and its excellent reputation for publishing some of the best scholarly work in eighteenth-century studies.

BUP: Could you speak to intersectionality in the collection?

Krueger: One of the things I hoped to find when I received submissions from the call for papers was variety: variety of travelers, authors, texts, and nationalities. I hoped to be able to bring together eighteenth- and nineteenth-century authors from around the Atlantic Ocean, as well as to bring together scholars from different points on the Atlantic. In the end, this collection features women travelers from Africa, Europe, and all of the Americas, as well as the Caribbean. Scholars hail from Canada, England, and the U.S. 

I also hoped to put together a collection that would be intersectional in its broader representation of long eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century women’s lives. It was important to show the ways women’s lived experiences depended on not only their points of embarkation and arrival, but also the many facets of their identities. I was excited to receive essays addressing race, gender, sexuality, and class as composite factors that determine the advantages, disadvantages, privileges, and discrimination, Black, white, and multiracial women faced in this time period and why it is important to examine their narratives from an intersectional perspective. A number of essays demonstrate how these factors shape women’s lives, as well as the interconnected nature of women’s networks. 

In the end, this volume collects the writings of amazing women scholars, including the fantastic Eve Tavor Bannet, who wrote the afterword, and focuses on a variety of women’s lives and writings. 

BUP: From your own research or in editing the collection of essays, what is something new or surprising about these women and their narratives that sticks with you?

Krueger: I have been thinking about the women featured in this collection for so long now that this question is difficult to answer. I could say it’s their adaptability, but that’s not new or surprising to me. I could say it’s their mobility, but again not new or surprising. I could say it’s their sense of solidarity, even despite the social forces that pull them apart and tear them down, but that does not surprise me either. Instead, I want to focus on what sticks with me: their resilience. This is what amazes me most—just how resilient they were and still are. Transatlantic women travelers crossed the ocean for a range of reasons, some of which had to do with charting a new life and escaping the past, and many of which were decided by others, especially in the case of enslaved women and women forced to leave their homelands due to patriarchal directives. 

Simply put, crossing the Atlantic Ocean from the eighteenth through the early nineteenth century was dangerous. To survive this journey, for some more than once in a roundtrip and some in the cargo hold of a slave ship, was no small feat. To survive this journey as a woman is even more spectacular. I am in awe of how the historical women featured in this collection managed this travel by sea and then land, and how writers of this era found ways to fictionalize women’s transatlantic journeys in order to make compelling arguments about women’s lives and their functions in their respective societies. This collection is dear to my heart because it reflects women’s strength and ability to persevere through the toughest times.

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For more work on women’s history and lives, check out these other books from Bucknell University Press.

Intelligent Souls?: Feminist Orientalism in Eighteenth-Century English Literature

by Samara Anne Cahill

Intelligent Souls? offers a new understanding of Islam in eighteenth-century Britain. Cahill explores two overlapping strands of thinking about women and Islam, which produce the phenomenon of “feminist orientalism.” One strand describes seventeenth-century ideas about the nature of the soul used to denigrate religio-political opponents. A second tracks the transference of these ideas to Islam during the Glorious Revolution and the Trinitarian controversy of the 1690s. Rowe, Carter, Lennox, More, and Wollstonecraft, Cahill argues, established common ground with men by leveraging the “otherness” identified with Islam to dispute British culture’s assumption that British women were lacking in intelligence, selfhood, or professional abilities.

Don’t Whisper Too Much and Portrait of a Young Artiste from Bona Mbella

by Frieda Ekotto

Don’t Whisper Too Much was the first work of fiction by an African writer to present love stories between African women in a positive light. Bona Mbella is the second. In presenting the emotional and romantic lives of gay, African women, Ekotto comments upon larger issues that affect these women, including Africa as a post-colonial space, the circulation of knowledge, and the question of who writes history. In recounting the beauty and complexity of relationships between women who love women, Ekotto inscribes these stories within African history, both past and present. 

Jane Austen and Comedy

Edited by Erin M. Goss

Jane Austen and Comedy takes for granted two related notions. First, Jane Austen’s books are funny; they induce laughter, and that laughter is worth attending to for a variety of reasons. Second, Jane Austen’s books are comedies, understandable both through the generic form that ends in marriage after the potential hilarity of romantic adversity and through a more general promise of wish fulfillment. In bringing together Austen and comedy, which are both often dismissed as superfluous or irrelevant to a contemporary world, this collection of essays directs attention to the ways we laugh, the ways that Austen may make us do so, and the ways that our laughter is conditioned by the form in which Austen writes: comedy. 

Writing Home: A Quaker Immigrant on the Ohio Frontier

by Emma Alderson, edited by Donald Ingram Ulin

Writing Home offers readers a firsthand account of the life of Emma Alderson, an otherwise unexceptional English immigrant on the Ohio frontier in mid-nineteenth-century America, who documented the five years preceding her death with astonishing detail and insight. Her convictions as a Quaker offer unique perspectives on racism, slavery, and abolition; the impending war with Mexico; presidential elections; various religious and utopian movements; and the practices of everyday life in a young country. Introductions and notes situate the letters in relation to their critical, biographical, literary, and historical contexts.

Modern Spanish Women as Agents of Change: Essays in Honor of Maryellen Bieder

Edited by Jennifer Smith

This volume brings together cutting-edge research on modern Spanish women as writers, activists, and embodiments of cultural change, and simultaneously honors Maryellen Bieder’s invaluable scholarly contribution to the field. The essays are innovative in their consideration of lesser-known women writers, focus on women as political activists, and use of post-colonialism, queer theory, and spatial theory to examine the period from the Enlightenment until World War II. Canonical authors such as Emilia Pardo Bazán, Leopoldo Alas “Clarín,” and Carmen de Burgos are considered alongside lesser known writers and activists such as María Rosa Gálvez, Sofía Tartilán, and Caterina Albert i Paradís. 

Bucknell University Press is honored to announce the appointment of Anne Fogarty as the new general editor of our Contemporary Irish Writers series. Fogarty is Full Professor of James Joyce Studies in the School of English, Drama, and Film at University College Dublin.

The Contemporary Irish Writers series, with recent publications on Medbh McGuckian, Eavan Boland, John Banville, and Bernard MacLaverty, has long brought theoretically informed perspectives to the work and lives of major Irish writers

Under Fogarty’s leadership, the series will welcome projects that pay particular attention to feminist issues, the environmental humanities, the perspectives of migrants in Irish society, nationalism and transnationalism, Northern Ireland and its writers, the Irish language, and the lively and often genre-crossing fiction, poetry, drama, and film of contemporary Ireland.

The first planned volumes in development under Professor Fogarty’s editorship include a reconsideration of the later novels of Edna O’Brien, and a cultural study of Seamus Heaney’s American years. 

Here, we talk with Fogarty about her vision for the series and the changing landscape of Irish literary studies.

BUP: The Contemporary Irish Writers series considers how both larger frameworks and the major figures of Irish studies are being rethought. What does this reframing mean to you?

Fogarty: Like every other sector of literary studies, the aims and objectives of Irish Studies are currently being reconsidered in light of a host of contemporary concerns. Inclusivity and diversity have become bigger priorities than ever. Discrimination in other areas is mirrored in our reading agendas. Encompassing more work by writers of color, women, working class writers, LGBT authors and immigrant writers not alone allows more voices to be heard it also enriches our vision of the world and enables a more active understanding of difference and of a variety of experiences of the world.

BUP: Why is now the time to renew and expand the Contemporary Irish Writers series? In what ways can the series meet the contemporary moment in culture and scholarship? What recent trends, interests, or changes stand out?

Fogarty: Contemporary studies have only recently been recognized as a discrete area of inquiry. The contemporary, moreover, covers not just very recent publications but also work that stretches back over the past few decades.  In Ireland, as elsewhere there has been an explosion of new writing and readers now have many more genres by Irish authors from which to choose, including detective novels, non-fiction, science fiction, collections of essays,  and writing for young adults.   Established twentieth-century writers continue to produce apace, Anne Enright, Roddy Doyle, Colm Tóibín, Conor McPherson, Glenn Patterson, Deirdre Madden, Marina Carr, Edna O’Brien, Vona Groarke, Joseph O’Connor, and Paula Meehan. We need to continue to take stock of their work but also to explore how our current preoccupations are mirrored and reflected on in their texts. The most urgent issues besetting us all center on the building of a society that is more equitable and more welcoming of diversity and rescuing the planet from the effects of climate change before it becomes too late. Bringing perspectives from feminism, queer studies and race studies, and ecocriticism to bear on the reading of Irish texts is at once illuminating, involving, and politically and culturally vital.

BUP: Bucknell University Press’s original Irish Writers Series began in the 1970s as a way to promote writers whose works warrant monographic exposure, covering writers including Sean O’Casey, James Clarence Mangan, Standish O’Grady, W.R. Rogers, and Thomas Davis. This series was reinvigorated in 2009 as the Contemporary Irish Writers Series to consider the vigorous shifts in Irish studies. Considering this history, how does your vision perhaps differ from the existing publications in the series?

Fogarty: It’s clear that Irish Writers Series reflect the moment in which they are conceived. The original series pivots on the literary revival and is dismayingly but unsurprisingly male-centered. But it does range across a wide array of genres and is prepared to shine a spotlight on figures who are more marginal and would be overlooked today. My vision for the new series of Contemporary Irish Writers is that it will be inclusive, risk-taking, and open. It will also I hope be pre-emptive in being unafraid to give space to a current author before they have faded into hallowed memory or have to be rescued from oblivion. It will aim to provide approachable overviews of chosen writers but also to interrogate their work from a variety of perspectives.

BUP: Can you offer any thoughts on the format of the series? What do you hope will make this series unique in Irish studies?

Fogarty: There is still a paucity of monographs on leading Irish writers and none at all on certain writers who command a wide readership. This series will be unique in furnishing studies of well-known authors but also up-and-coming writers captured at a significant moment in their careers. In primarily sponsoring monographic investigations of writers, it will consolidate and widen the canon of Irish writers but also question whether fixed canons serve any purpose. The series will connect with the Irish works taught in university classrooms around the world such as Brooklyn, The Gathering, The Country Girls, Portia Coughlan, Translations, and North, but also consider a broad array of authors from Tana French to John Banville and Donal Ryan to Jan Carson.

BUP: Could you briefly describe some of your own scholarly work and interests? 

Fogarty: I trained as an early modern scholar and entered that field when it was being entirely rethought by new historicist, postcolonial, and feminist critics in the late 1980s. This has marked all my subsequent work, even though I am now a Joyce scholar and also have broad interests in Irish Studies.  My publications on Joyce have centered on historicist approaches to his work which draw out the revolutionary aspects and material embeddedness of his writing.  I have edited special issues of journals on Spenser in Ireland, Lady Gregory, Irish Women Novelists, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, and Benedict Kiely.  I have written especially about women writers, including  Eavan Boland, Lady Gregory, Mary Lavin, Éilís Ní Dhuibhne, Mary O’Donnell, Kate O’Brien, Elizabeth Bowen, Eimear McBride, and Sara Baume, but have also published essays on Colum McCann and Frank McGuinness.  I am currently editing a collection of essays on Flann O’Brien, writing an essay on Joyce and the eighteenth-century epistolary novel, and have co-edited with Marisol Morales-Ladrón the first collection of essays on the Irish novelist Deirdre Madden which is forthcoming from Manchester University Press. 

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Anne Fogarty is Professor of James Joyce Studies at University College Dublin and founder and co-editor with Luca Crispi of the Dublin James Joyce Journal. She has written widely on aspects of twentieth century and contemporary Irish writing, including on Eavan Boland, Colum McCann, Colm Tóibín, Mary Lavin, Roddy Doyle, Eimear McBride, Frank McGuinness, and Emma Donoghue.

Those interested in the origins of the Contemporary Irish Writers series and its predecessor, the Irish Writers Series, might enjoy this post.

Celebrate and learn during Black History Month with texts from the Griot Project Book Series, an interdisciplinary series published in association with the Griot Institute for the Study of Black Lives and Cultures. 

A griot is a central figure in West African cultures that historically held many functions, including community historian, cultural critic, indigenous artist and collective spokesperson. At Bucknell University, the Griot Institute for the Study of Black Lives and Cultures provides faculty and students intellectual and creative engagement with the interdisciplinary investigation of the cultures, histories, narratives, peoples, geographies and arts of Africa and the African diaspora. 

Bucknell University Press is honored to extend the Griot Institute’s mission by publishing monographs, collections of essays, and poetry exploring the aesthetics, art, history, and culture of African America and the African diaspora. “In bringing out new creative and scholarly work that complements the Griot Institute’s programming, we honor the vision of founding series editor Carmen Gillespie,” says Suzanne Guiod, Bucknell University Press Director.

Testimony: Found Poems from the Special Court for Sierra Leone

by Shanee Stepakoff

Derived from public testimonies at a UN-backed war crimes tribunal in Freetown, this remarkable poetry collection aims to breathe new life into the records of Sierra Leone’s civil war, delicately extracting heartbreaking human stories from the morass of legal jargon. By rendering selected trial transcripts in poetic form, Shanee Stepakoff finds a novel way to communicate not only the suffering of Sierra Leone’s people, but also their courage, dignity, and resilience. Her use of innovative literary techniques helps to ensure that the voices of survivors are not forgotten, but rather heard across the world. 
 
This volume also includes an introduction that explores how the genre of “found poetry” can serve as a uniquely powerful means through which writers may bear witness to atrocity. This book’s unforgettable excavation and shaping of survivor testimonies opens new possibilities for speaking about the unspeakable.

African American Arts: Activism, Aesthetics, and Futurity

Edited by Sharrell D. Luckett

Signaling such recent activist and aesthetic concepts in the work of Kara Walker, Childish Gambino, BLM, Janelle Monáe, and Kendrick Lamar, and marking the exit of the Obama Administration and the opening of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, this anthology explores the role of African American arts in shaping the future, and further informing new directions we might take in honoring and protecting the success of African Americans in the U.S. The essays in African American Arts: Activism, Aesthetics, and Futurity engage readers in critical conversations by activists, scholars, and artists reflecting on national and transnational legacies of African American activism as an element of artistic practice, particularly as they concern artistic expression and race relations, and the intersections of creative processes with economic, sociological, and psychological inequalities.

Don’t Whisper Too Much and Portrait of a Young Artiste from Bona Mbella

by Frieda Ekotto

Don’t Whisper Too Much was the first work of fiction by an African writer to present love stories between African women in a positive light. Bona Mbella is the second. In presenting the emotional and romantic lives of gay, African women, Ekotto comments upon larger issues that affect these women, including Africa as a post-colonial space, the circulation of knowledge, and the question of who writes history. In recounting the beauty and complexity of relationships between women who love women, Ekotto inscribes these stories within African history, both past and present. Don’t Whisper Too Much follows young village girl Ada’s quest to write her story on her own terms, outside of heteronormative history. Bona Mbella focuses upon the life of a young woman from a poor neighborhood in an African megalopolis. And “Panè,” a love story, brings the many themes from Don’t Whisper Too Much and Bona Mbella together as it explores how emotional and sexual connections between women have the power to transform, even in the face of great humiliation and suffering. Each story in the collection addresses how female sexuality is often marked by violence, and yet is also a place for emotional connection, pleasure and agency.

Postracial America?: An Interdisciplinary Study

Edited by Vincent L. Stephens and Anthony Stewart

The concept of a “postracial” America —the dream of a nation beyond race — has attracted much attention over the course of the presidency of Barack Obama, suggesting that this idea is peculiar to the contemporary moment alone. Postracial America? An Interdisciplinary Study attempts to broaden the application of this idea by situating it in contexts that demonstrate how the idea of the postracial has been with America since its founding and will continue to be long after the Obama administration’s term ends. The chapters in this volume explore the idea of the postracial in the United States through a variety of critical lenses, including film studies; literature; aesthetics and conceptual thinking; politics; media representations; race in relation to gender, identity, and sexuality; and personal experiences. Through this diverse interdisciplinary exploration, this collection skeptically weighs the implications of holding up a postracial culture as an admirable goal for the United States.

In Media Res: Race, Identity, and Pop Culture in the Twenty-First Century

Edited by James Braxton Peterson

In Media Res is a manifold collection that reflects the intersectional qualities of university programming in the twenty-first century. Taking race, gender, and popular culture as its central thematic subjects, the volume collects academic essays, speeches, poems, and creative works that critically engage a wide range of issues, including American imperialism, racial and gender discrimination, the globalization of culture, and the limitations of our new multimedia world. This diverse assortment of works by scholars, activists, and artists models the complex ways that we must engage university students, faculty, staff, and administration in a moment where so many of us are confounded by the “in medias res” nature of our interface with the world in the current moment. Featuring contributions from Imani Perry, Michael Eric Dyson, Suheir Hammad, John Jennings, and Adam Mansbach, In Media Res is a primer for academic inquiry into popular culture; American studies; critical media literacy; women, gender, and sexuality studies; and Africana studies. 

Venus of Khala-Kanti

By Angèle Kingué, Translated by Christine Schwartz Hartley

Venus of Khala-Kanti is a tale of life-altering loss and mystical recovery. Set in an imaginary West African village that becomes a charming cul-de-sac, the unintended consequence of a national roadwork project gone awry, the story follows characters drawn with humor, irony, and empathy. The heart of the story beats with the laughter and tears of three women. Having faced incredible hardship, they come together to build their lives anew, armed with the age-old spirit of human resilience, understanding, and tenderness. Tapping into the very soil of Khala-Kanti, Bella, Assumta, and Clarisse construct spaces, both internal and external, where they and others can rejuvenate their bodies, minds, and spirits. They build the Good Hope Center, which embraces both the physical and the mystical landscape of the story. The Center fuels the restoration and growth of the village’s inhabitants, and offers sanctuary for those who visit and those who stay. 

Catastrophic Bliss

By Myronn Hardy

Catastrophic Bliss contemplates the longing to understand connections and disconnections within a world ever more fragmented yet interdependent. With allusions to Dante, Stevie Wonder, Fernando Pessoa, Persephone and Marianne Moore, these poems move from the tumultuous to the sublime: a pit bull killing an invading thief, two people on a New York City subway playing chess, Billy Eckstine recording in Rio de Janeiro, to an imagined Barack Obama writing poems to his father. Myronn Hardy’s third collection comprises war, place, love, and history all yearning to be reconciled.

Toni Morrison: Forty Years in The Clearing

Edited by Carmen Gillespie

Toni Morrison: Forty Years in The Clearing enables audiences/readers, critics, and students to review Morrison’s cultural and literary impacts and to consider the import, and influence of her legacies in her multiple roles as writer, editor, publisher, reader, scholar, artist, and teacher over the last four decades.

Some of the highlights of the collection include contributions from many of the major scholars of Morrison’s canon: as well as art pieces, music, photographs and commentary from poets, Nikki Giovanni and Sonia Sanchez; novelist, A.J. Verdelle; playwright, Lydia Diamond; composer, Richard Danielpour; photographer, Timothy Greenfield-Sanders; the first published interview with Morrison’s friends from Howard University, Florence Ladd and Mary Wilburn; and commentary from President Barack Obama.

What distinguishes this bookfrom the many other publications that engage Morrison’s work is that the collection is not exclusively a work of critical interpretation or reference. This is the first publication to contextualize and to consider the interdisciplinary, artistic, and intellectual impacts of Toni Morrison using the formal fluidity and dynamism that characterize her work.

Before we ring in 2021, Bucknell University Press would like to take a moment to celebrate the awards and reviews our books and authors earned in 2020 and recognize their impact on scholarship around the world.

Avenues of Translation: The City in Iberian and Latin American Writing

Avenues of Translation edited by Regina Galasso and Evelyn Scaramella won the 2020 SAMLA Studies Book Award — Edited Collection. Using the Latin word for “translation,” translatio, or “to carry across,” as a point of departure, Avenues of Translation explores how translation perpetuates, diversifies, deepens, and expands the literary production of cities in their greater cultural context, and how translation shapes an understanding of and access to a city’s past and present literary and cultural practices.

Reading Homer’s Odyssey

Reading Homer’s Odyssey by Kostas Myrsiades was named a finalist in the 2020 PROSE Awards, Classics Section. Reading Homer’s Odyssey offers a book-by-book commentary on the epic’s themes that informs the non-specialist and engages the seasoned reader in new perspectives.

Novel Bodies: Disability and Sexuality in Eighteenth-Century British Literature

Novel Bodies by Jason S. Farr earned several positive reviews throughout the year.

“Farr’s framework, which further upholds form, content, and eighteenth-century social justice assuredly feels like one trajectory forward. In short, for those looking for a model in how to do intersectional work well in the eighteenth century, Novel Bodies fits the bill.”
–Studies in the Novel

“Novel Bodies: Disability and Sexuality in Eighteenth-Century British Literature inhabits the fascinating messiness of Georgian-era literary imaginings of corporeal and sexual difference in order to better historicize disability’s formative role in the development of the modern self and its queer relationship to able-bodiedness.”
–Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies

“Novel Bodies raises an important intersection that clearly needs more careful attention from our scholarly community: race, sexuality, and disability….Novel Bodies succeeds in the story it wants to tell….By attending to representations of corporealities and sexualities that seem liberating, oppressive, recuperative, and resistant, Farr renders the genealogy of sex and disability in a way that challenges those consequences of the Enlightenment that we are still wrestling with today.”
–Eighteenth-Century Fiction

“Novel Bodies makes a thrilling foray into a number of critical conversations. Its readability reflects Farr’s careful articulation of the relation of each chapter to the others and to his primary argument. Scholars of British literature will benefit from Novel Bodies‘ new perspective on several canonical authors, while scholars of American literature might turn to it to consider how the representations of, and responses to, disability and queerness on which it focuses might have crossed the Atlantic, where many of these works were being read and discussed.”
–Eighteenth Century Studies

Woven Shades of Green: An Anthology of Irish Nature Literature

Literary Hub included Timothy Wenzell’s Woven Shades of Green in their spring roundup of “The Best of the University Presses: 100 Books to Escape the News.” The book was also reviewed in the Irish Studies Review.

“Readers familiar with Irish literature and ecocriticism will find this volume filled with familiar faces and materials, as well as a few more obscure and exciting ones. This anthology offers scholars a series of substantial pieces from which to expand and further consider Irish nature writing and Irish approaches to the natural world.”
–Irish Studies Review

Don’t Whisper Too Much and Portrait of a Young Artiste from Bona Mbella

Don’t Whisper Too Much and Portrait of a Young Artiste from Bona Mbella by Frieda Ekotto earned a spot in Literary Hub‘s “The Best of the University Presses: 100 Books to Escape the News.” 

“Don’t Whisper Too Much was the first work of fiction by an African writer to present love stories between African women in a positive light; Bona Mbella is the second.”
–Literary Hub

The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe

The Times Literary Supplement reviewed The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe edited by Maximillian E. Novak, Irving N. Rothman, and Manuel Schonhornon.

“This book does all that you could ask of a thoroughly scholarly work, but won’t deter any enquirer; its introduction is thorough, judicious and wise, its bibliographical apparatus refrains from crowding the story and authentic illustrations are expertly annotated. Crisp footnotes, on the right page, are thorough, responsible and concise.”
–Times Literary Supplement

Early Puerto Rican Cinema and Nation Building

The German journal MEDIENwissenschaft Rezensionen reviewed Early Puerto Rican Cinema and Nation Building by Naida Garcia Crespo in the latest 2020 issue.

“García-Crespo’s professional, methodical approach is particularly to be emphasized….[A]n in-depth history of the film’s beginnings in Puerto Rico.”
–MEDIENwissenschaft Rezensionen

The Memory Sessions

Suzanne Farrell Smith, author of The Memory Sessions, was featured in an interview “Writing Small Moments: A Conversation with Suzanne Farrell Smith” on The Rumpus.

“One of my motivations for writing [The Memory Sessions] is to encourage readers to interrogate their own memories and to not be afraid to do that, and to do it in a way that gives themselves permission to be wrong about the memory. I think there is a door that opens in the mind to a whole lot of other discoveries. I think the moment we label our memories as wrong or bad, the door just never opens. It’s shut. I think that by walking through that door, you then find other doors, and then you get exposed to all the other stories out there. What I mean by that is, by spending all of this time interrogating my own memory, I was able to interrogate my sisters’ memories and come to this much more gracious understanding of the things they’re carrying, too.” -Suzanne Farrell Smith, in The Rumpus

Beyond Human: Vital Materialisms in the Andean Avant-Gaurds

Tara Daly’s Beyond Human was reviewed in The Bulletin of Spanish Studies and Hispanic Review.

“From the pedagogical perspective, Beyond Human is teachable in its entirety in a course on Latin-American Vanguards or on the cultural production in the Andean region. The chapters can also be used as stand-alone material on the five intellectuals discussed in the book.”
–The Bulletin of Spanish Studies

“Beyond Human offers an important reading that adds to ongoing discussions of new materialism….[A] very interesting book that proposes a fresh reading of materiality in the Andes.”
–Hispanic Review

Modern Spanish Women as Agents of Change: Essays in Honor of Maryellen Bieder

The Bulletin of Spanish Studies and Hispania reviewed Modern Spanish Women as Agents of Change, edited by Jennifer Smith.

“Jennifer Smith continues to vindicate the validity of feminism today. There is no doubt that Maryellen Bieder would be proud of the legacy passed on to her numerous disciples and colleagues.”
–The Bulletin of Spanish Studies

“An outstanding contribution of cutting-edge research to students and scholars of feminist discourses, gender studies, and modern Peninsular literatures and cultures.”
–Hispania

Transmedia Creatures: Frankenstein’s Afterlives

Science Fiction Studies included a review of Transmedia Creatures edited by Francesca Saggini and Anna Enrichetta Soccio.

“In Transmedia Creatures, Saggini and Soccio collect a truly international group of thirteen contributors who investigate the ways how Frankenstein adaptations traverse media, genre, and national boundaries….[T]his volume particularly appealing to instructors looking for innovation in teaching the novel.”
–Science Fiction Studies

Pretexts for Writing: German Romantic Prefaces, Literature, and Philosophy

The July 2020 issue of Modern Language Review included a review of Pretexts for Writing by Seán M. Williams.

“This debut book, in short, contains much that is scintillant and surely announces the arrival of an important new scholarly voice in Germanistik.”
–Modern Language Review

The Printed Reader: Gender, Quixotism, and Textual Bodies in Eighteenth-Century Britain

The Times Literary Supplement and the Journal of British Studies reviewed The Printed Reader by Amelia Dale.

“Dale conducts a subtle and interestingly circular argument about quixotism and gender….[A]n ingenious, energetic and polished book, which cleverly associates a number of current critical concerns.”
–Times Literary Supplement

“The Printed Reader is a brilliant contribution to the study of how eighteenth-century British writers understood Don Quixote and deployed quixotic parody in their works.”
–Journal of British Studies

Cultivating Peace: The Virgilian Georgic in English, 1650-1750

The Spring 2020 issue of Eighteenth-Century Studies reviewed Cultivating Peace by Melissa Schoenberger.

“Cultivating Peace is a fascinating book about Virgil’s didactic agricultural poem The Georgics and the poetry and political thinking that it inspired in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century England. Melissa Schoenberger recovers, from Virgil’s poem, a distinctively georgic understanding of peace as mutable and contingent.”
–Eighteenth Century Studies

Community and Solitude: New Essays on Johnson’s Circle

The March 2020 issue of Choice reviewed Community and Solitude edited by Anthony W. Lee.

“The scholarship is of a consistently high level, and the prose is clear and well edited. Community and Solitude provides a salutary reminder that authorship is not always the solitary activity that many people assume. Recommend.”
–Choice

Mikhail Bakhtin: The Duvakin Interviews, 1973

The Russian Review reviewed Mikhail Bakhtin edited by Slav N. Gratchev and Margarita Marinova in the January 2020 issue.

“While some readers may not relish working through the thicket of allusions and references that occasion these interviews, there are many rewards to be had for doing so, especially for intellectual historians of twentieth-century Russia, and for Bakhtin scholars everywhere. I recommend it highly.”
–The Russian Review

To the Fairest Cape: European Encounters in the Cape of Good Hope

The annual 1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era (Vol. 25) and the German journal Jahrbuch fűr Europäische Überseegeschichte reviewed The Fairest Cape by Malcom Jack.

“It is a beautifully produced book, well written and well illustrated with contemporary color plates. It will be most useful in the hands of a general reader wanting a general introduction to Cape travel writers.”
–1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era (Vol. 25)

“This book is a gift for anyone who is interested in the people of the world living together. It is written in elegant prose and makes its concern pointedly clear. Apart from the people, it is the impressive landscape and nature of South Africa which fascinates the author and for which he finds heavenly words. It is essential to see these features of the overall picture because they gave the people living there for thousands of years a functioning place to live. The book points out strongly that the unity between people and the land was destroyed by the Europeans, but the author avoids any moral indignation and lets the facts alone speak for themselves. The reader who is less familiar with the history of South Africa feels at least at this point the wish to know the country more intensely.”
–Jahrbuch fűr Europäische Überseegeschichte

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For more information about any of these titles or other books and series published by Bucknell University Press, visit our 2020 catalog.